Into the Showers

 

 Into the Showers



     After surviving the abrupt move from my beloved South Gate to the repulsive La Habra I managed to act out in bad and some good ways. In the 8th grade I was disruptive in class, desperately seeking attention and was a terrible student who learned little. The head nun called my parents in for a conference and told them my IQ was 138 but my grades were substandard, approaching failure in some cases. Not only, did I not pay attention I was always trying to get the other good kids to be naughty like me. I was under-sized while many boys were becoming men but I made up for some of that by excelling at sports which I had learned in South Gate living a few hundred feet away from "the Park." Despite being a shrimp I  scored seven touchdowns for my schools flag-football team and had the top batting average on the baseball team. I was not that great at basketball but was one of the best at the kind of lousy OLG squad. However, I was not being played by the coach, a straight-edge jerk but generous enough to donate his time to coach all three sports. One day out of frustration I asked him why I  was not playing on the basketball team and he told me he had spotted me smoking by the bike racks. Truth was I really was not smoking but had found a cigarette on the ground and put it in my mouth to clown around for the other kids. Once the smoking thing was cleared up I was elevated to a guard position on the team that played in the St. Paul High tournament for CYO Orange County schools. We never came close to a win and finished last. However, the last losing effort finished and as we left the court vanquished I spotted my Dad, of all people in the stands.  His sole purpose was to bully me into taking a shower with the other boys despite my late maturation and abscense of body hair. Some of the guys had begun their development into manhood and had a few whiskers plus the all-important pubic hair. Since I was years away from this development it was a highly embarassing five minutes to join the boys naked where my pink boyish slick body could be made fun of and ridiculed further at school. However, BC saw this as a rite of manhood and actually came into the locker room to make sure I did not fake the shower humiliation. Whereas some kids had actual hanging balls and a true dick I had what looked to be a little peanut. In my first years of high school without a father to force me I never bared my shameful lack of body hair and just dressed over my sweaty torso. It is pathetic that boys gave so much importance to hair that soon after became more of a nuisance than a source of pride. I went to Europe as a college boy in 1968 and came back with a sparse tangle of soft whiskers on my face and a true beard did not arrive until I was completing my studies on the hills of Westwood.



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